Daily dose of Borges

For a couple of months now I’ve been dipping into a collection of short stories by Jorge Borges. The book is called Collection Fictions, and it is comprised of most of his short stories collected in earlier seperate editions.

I try to read at least one story every night, though I haven’t kept up that pace. Some nights I miss altogether; others, I will read several stories.

They’re generally quite short pieces — rarely more than a few pages — and they are always imaginative and often puzzling, which is why I’m reading them. I’m sure I’ll never be able to write like Borges (or Faulkner, for that matter), but there is still plenty of payoff in just reading their words and see the things they do with narrative, the language, and story telling.

Update: I finally finished reading this collection on January 2, 2011. I enjoyed most of it, but some of the stories about knife fighters got to be repetitive.